Our gaming group is looking for some new blood! We are looking for 1-2 more players.

Who We Are: A small gaming group of mid-late 30's adults looking for like-minded gamers for a wide variety of RPGs. We like open-ended campaigns as well as short campaigns and occasional one-shots. Some shake-ups in our group's lineup due to the economy has left us looking for new members.

With over 30 years of gaming experience, we have a wide variety of games we play and enjoy. Those listed above are just some of those that capture our current interests.

What We're Looking For:

We're looking for mature gamers who can commit to a fairly regular gaming schedule and who fit our preferred playstyle. Couples are welcome as are individual gamers who match our interests.

We ask all players who join us to be 18 or over, but otherwise consider maturity to be more important than chronological age. We play in Elgin, IL, so prospective players should be able and willing to commute if they live elsewhere.

We prefer to play on alternating Saturdays, from mid-afternoon until late at night, usually 8 or more hours per session.

We recognize that there's a lot of different ways to play roleplaying games and enjoy them. For us, however, we know what we like and what we're looking for out of our gaming experiences. Naturally, we're interested in players who enjoy the same things:

We enjoy Being In Character. The Point of Play for us is for the players to be in character as much as possible, and make decisions based on what their character would do in that situation, not based on what's optimal from a meta-game perspective. Roleplaying doesn't stop when the dice come out or combat starts: combat is just another opportunity to Be In Character!

We enjoy Motivated, Proactive Characters. We don't think it's the GM's job to spoon-feed a storyline to the players who just wander through it room by room until they find an NPC with a quest like in a computer game. Rather, strong protagonists should have strong motives, things that drive them to go out in the world and try to accomplish things all on their own. It's the GM's role to facilitate this as well as to challenge it. The story, insofar as there is one, is all about the PCs goals, and the things they do and encounter along the way to accomplishing them.

We enjoy Heroically Flawed Characters. It's no fun to play someone without flaws, who's perfect in every way. The most interesting characters are those with an Achilles Heel of some kind, a soft spot or blind spot or sore spot that they have to struggle with from time to time.

We embrace Adversity. Many people play the game by trying to keep their characters away from as much trouble as they can. We think seeing how the characters deal with adversity is much more interesting, and get a vicarious thrill when our characters have to struggle or suffer in their attempts to win. It helps to show us who they are, and what they're made of. Getting into trouble is what Player Characters do.

We believe combat isn't everything. Combat is often a big part of many roleplaying games. It's hard to play heroic adventurers in many settings without engaging in combat frequently. However, combat is a means to an end, it's what the PCs are fighting for that matters much more than the mechanics involved.

We believe strongly in adhering to Genre Conventions â€“ If we're playing a swashbuckling game, we expect the PCs to fit into the genre and be swashbuckling heroes with all that entails. Similarly, if we're playing a horror game, we expect the kind of characters who will go into the basement in the spooky old house, and it would be out of character for them not to! We're intimately familiar with the genres we play in, and part of the appeal of playing those genres is to emulate that same feel. It just falls flat when the swashbuckling hero wants to spend 20 minutes coming up with the perfect battle plan instead of just swinging into the middle of the Evil Sheriff's castle on a chandelier!

We believe in being creative! First and foremost, RPGs are a game of the imagination, which means we feel that having a good imagination and being creative and inventive go hand in hand with playing RPGs. We think players should use the game as a creative outlet and we are looking for players who would enjoy the creative aspects of evoking a specific character in a specific game setting. Even small nuances and creative flourishes can greatly enhance the game.

We believe in being collaborative! It's everyone's responsibility to make the game fun, not just the GM's. The GM's job does include presenting challenges and making judgments, but ultimately the GM is collaborating with the players to make an interesting game. We think all the players should invest a little time and energy both in and out of game into making the game more fun for everyone, and that everyone should trust each other enough to know that we're all on the same side in the end.

We believe the rules exist to facilitate play, not define it. We don't appreciate rules-lawyering or arguing over minutia of what the rules do or do not say. The game rules exist to add structure and unpredictability/randomness to our creativity, not something to be exploited or manipulated. Likewise, characters should be able to attempt anything that someone with their abilities should reasonably be able to do, rather than having the player decide the character's action from a menu of mechanical options.

I want to find more people who are interested in the drama and character acting bits of the game and less interested in the mechanical and metagamey side of it. I want those "...and we didn't even touch the dice once!" awesome sessions back from time to time.

While I've always managed to attract a few of these kinds of players, they tend to make people who are more interested in the other bits of the game roll their eyes when the IC stuff gets really thick and heavy. I want to get a full table of the IC folks instead, so we can spend the whole session roleplaying out exploring a strange city and meeting it's inhabitants or attending a dinner party and rubbing elbows with the city's elite, if that's what people really want to do, without someone getting antsy because we're "wasting time" with all the "talking", or seeing a great opportunity for intrigue turn into "can't I just roll for it" dice fests.

Does this sound like your kind of gaming? If so, I'd love to hear from you!